The Disappeared (11 page)

‘There is a way of saying nothing, Iona, which is also a way of saying everything.'

‘Perhaps, if you are very intimate with Sharon…'

He interrupted her angrily.

‘She didn't speak to me about it, but I have the evidence in something she wrote.'

He reached into his briefcase for the story of Miranda and Caliban. But he recalled the incriminating words with which it ended, and hesitated. At last he detached the first page and put it down on the desk. Iona held the sheet out long-sightedly in front of her.

‘Nice handwriting,' she said.

And she read aloud the first paragraph, pausing from time to time to look at Stephen quizzically.

‘Well,' she said, ‘this is a clever child with a pronounced streak of fantasy. I am sure she is a pleasure to teach. But you can't honestly expect me to take this seriously as evidence of rape. And listen to this for racist language:
Miranda pitied him, took pains to make him speak, taught him each hour one thing or other; when he did not (savage) know his own meaning, but would gabble, like a thing most brutish, she endowed his purposes with words that made them known
. Strong stuff.'

‘It's a quotation,' said Stephen, ‘and a very clever one.'

‘A quotation?'

‘Yes. From Shakespeare, from
The Tempest
, the play that features Caliban and Miranda.'

‘So I was right, then. Listen Stephen, you will appreciate that we can't act on something like this. It is not evidence of anything save the girl's fantasies.'

‘So you are going to let the matter drop, even though it is you who raised it?'

‘Not at all. I appreciate your coming to see me. You wouldn't have come without a reason. And I am going to go back and explore. We'll keep an eye on Sharon, and if there's anything suspicious we will act. If necessary we will alert the police.'

Iona talked on in a relaxed way, referring to other examples of girls at risk, of girls who had gone astray, of girls who had disappeared, so that Stephen could not resist the thought that it is easy to take attractive girls out of circulation by putting them into care. One of Iona's examples especially troubled him. Moira Callaghan had been taken into care at the same time as Sharon, being like Sharon the victim of drug-addicted parents who had neglected and finally abandoned her. Like Sharon, too, she had been placed with a family in Angel Towers, since it was Council policy to look for working class homes for working class children, not least because it was working class homes that needed the extra money. Moira's adopted parents were real racists, however, and took against the Afghans and the Iraqis in a big way, so that when Moira fell for one of the Afghan boys they started spreading stories of rape, and making the girl's life such hell that eventually she ran away.

The Council tried to keep track of her; they knew that she was on the game for a while in Hull, they heard rumours of her involvement with a gang of Polish mariners, and eventually got wind of her from the British Embassy in Moscow, where she turned up one day, with a confused story of having escaped from the mafia boss who was protecting her. The Embassy had been trying to arrange her passage back to England and her adoptive parents. But within days she had disappeared again, and there was nothing further to be done.

Stephen heard Iona's narrative, sick at heart. For clearly it described the girl whom Sharon had called Ophelia, her only friend in times of true adversity. On the bus back to Whinmoore he re-read the story of Miranda and Caliban. Walking from the bus-stop, in a cold winter evening when every huddled figure seemed to turn from him towards comforts that he could not share, he knew that he should pack up and go, leaving behind him forever this situation that he could not remedy and this grief that cut him to the heart. But by the front door of his block, shivering in her flimsy uniform, stood Sharon Williams. She was pale and agitated and made a point of blocking his passage.

‘I just wanna say, sir, you shouldna take that last one seriously. I made it all up, sir. And dunna you never show it to no one else, please, sir. Promise, sir?'

She clung to him and he could not meet her gaze. How could he tell her that he had just done what she begged him not to do? More than anything she wanted respect from him. And at every turn he slighted her.

‘Of course I won't, Sharon. But really you should be at home now.'

‘Home's where you are, sir.'

She hid from him, and he sensed that she was crying. And when she raised her eyes at last, and the blue-grey irises shone on him through the flood of tears, all his defences fell.

When you start out of the blackness he is standing there, the packet of condoms unopened in his hand, his face puzzled and uncertain. You are shaking still, but there is a little corner in your fear where reason has entered. He finds it difficult to look at you, now that your eyes are open. His own eyes are dark but somehow distant, as though captured by hidden thoughts. The flesh is smooth, nut-brown and boyish, and his pale blue cotton shirt above the jeans is clean and neatly ironed, as though a mother somewhere still looks after him.

‘You're alive then,' he says.

‘Unfortunately,' you reply. ‘And anyway, what do you care?'

His face wrinkles, rejecting your words.

‘I'm no' the kind of pervert who can fuck a girl when she's dead, man. Or when she's blacked out neither. Where's the fun, if she dunna know what's happening?'

He assumes an expression of transparent reasonableness, as though inviting you to argue the point. You are thinking quickly now. You have only one chance to find a protector on this ship, and this is it. Keep him talking. But it is hard to talk when you feel sick to the core.

‘And where's the fun if she knows what's happening and would rather die?'

He looks at you curiously.

‘That's what they say. But they dunna mean it.'

‘There are vile creeps who think of women like that. But do you really want to be like them – like those two who tried it out on me?'

‘You bad mouth my brother, man, and you'll regret it,' he says through clenched teeth. He is coming forward now, as though the thought of his brother has reminded him that he too is a man. This gives you an idea.

‘Just hold it. So you can have a brother and still be an animal? Do you have a sister too?

‘You leave her out of it, or I'll kill you.'

‘Feel free,' you say, and fix him with a look into which you distil all that you can of female vulnerability. ‘Just don't tell her about it.'

He hesitates, offering you an advantage.

‘Look, what's your name?' you ask.

‘Yunus.'

‘Look, Yunus, before you try it out on me I want you to imagine that you are some great thug of a white man, the kind you have always hated because he takes the prizes that you hope to win, and that I am your sister, whose life is going to be ruined and whose family is going to be dishonoured by what you do. OK?'

He reassumes his expression of argumentative reasonableness. You notice that he has put the hand holding the condoms into his pocket.

‘OK, but see the girls normally dunna have nowt family. That's the whole point. We're the only family they has. There's no honour involved, see? Except what we decide.'

‘There's the difference. I do have a family. Let's assume it's a family like yours. They are not going to be happy with this.'

‘Yeah,' he says with a shrug. ‘But I dunna give a fuck about 'em, do I?'

‘I'm not asking you to feel anything about my family. Nor even about me. I just want you to imagine your sister, going through what I'm going through.'

His eyes shift uneasily from side to side and he purses his lips.

‘So what's your name?' he says after a moment.

‘Catherine,' you reply. You have always liked the name, which was that of your best friend at school. Even now, saying it aloud, you feel a soft breeze from the dormitory where you lay side by side, sometimes in her bed, sometimes in yours, reading aloud from
The Wind in the Willows
. It is the first comfort that you have felt on this ship.

‘Here's the deal then, Catherine. We dunna talk about families. We leave my sister out of this. And what happens is just between you and me, right?'

You cannot suppress a bitter laugh.

‘And if what happens is rape?'

Again his eyes shift from side to side.

‘It's rape if you make it rape. For fuck's sake. It's up to you.'

‘The philosophy of Yunus, in three sentences,' you return. ‘Ask your sister if she agrees.'

It jolts him.

‘I said to leave her out of this.'

‘Fine, if we can agree the other terms.'

‘I'll say this for you. You've got guts. There's none else on this ship would put up with that much fucking cheek.'

‘It's why I'm talking to you.'

He looks at you and a kind of experimental acceptance enters his expression. It strikes you that he was not cut out for this career, and you almost feel sorry for him, as he sits on the bunk without touching you, takes his hands from his pockets and folds them in his lap. He is no longer holding the packet of condoms.

‘Shit!' he says. He stares at the floor in silence. You notice that the humming of the engines has ceased. The ship seems to be rocking slightly.
As idle as a painted ship/ Upon a painted ocean
. With the familiar words comes the image of the classroom where you learned them, at the desk next to Catherine's. You recall her girlish confidences, how she was to marry someone like Coleridge, a poet and a scholar, and maybe make a career as viola in a famous string quartet. You recall her dimpled smile, her quiet laughter and her way of greeting you at the end of each long holiday, putting her arms around your neck and her nose in your hair. Strange that you lost touch when you left for Cambridge and she for the Royal College of Music. Where is she now, you wonder, and has anything like this, anything so unspeakably horrible, happened to Catherine? You weep for Catherine, pitying her imagined woes. You weep and weep, and it is as though the whole world had fallen away from the scene of her imagined violation.

‘OK, OK,' he says. ‘I'm not gonna do nowt. Just you stop crying.'

There are noises on deck, feet slapping on the metal, machinery cranking, people shouting in a foreign language, Russian maybe, perhaps Polish. You feel a sudden rush of hope. The ship is turning round. The ship has been boarded by the coast guards. The Royal Navy has sent a frigate. There has been a change of plan and you are to be put ashore in a lifeboat. A hundred unfounded stories flit through your mind and put an end to your tears.

‘Yunus, can you do something for me?'

He looks startled by your tone and turns to you.

‘I'm thirsty. Can you fetch me some drinkable water? And maybe pass me that apple.'

The appeal to everyday considerateness places him in a quandary. You see him struggle for a moment before wriggling from his throne.

‘Sure. I'll get some water. No bother.'

He stands, picks up the apple and then hesitates, before throwing it across to you.

‘You're fucking cute, Catherine.'

He goes out quickly and locks the door from outside.

What despicable residue of female vanity causes you to get up from the berth and smooth your tear-stained face before the bathroom mirror? What irrational hope of re-joining the world of your ambitions, of putting this vile episode forever out of mind and reassembling not your features only but the neat self-confident soul that spoke through them, causes you to dab cold water on your eyes and on the slight bruise between them, or to take pleasure in the fact, if it is a fact, that no one will notice it? What absurd renewal of trust in your social gifts leads you to accept the presence in the mirror of another face behind your own? And why believe that this Yunus, who is clearly the weakest member of the gang that kidnapped you, has any power to keep them at bay? Why especially now, when you realise with fainting heart that it is not the face of Yunus that stares at yours from the mirror, but that of the man with stringy black hair who had already taken a leading part in defiling you? You spin round and shout at him.

‘Get away from me!'

And he laughs.

A woman with a Yorkshire accent answered Justin's call. She told him that, if Muhibbah Shahin is on their list, they can act immediately, provided they receive a call from Muhibbah. The personal emergency line is just that: personal.

‘If you have evidence of something wrong,' the woman added, ‘then you must report it to the police.'

‘But I
am
reporting it to the police,' he protested.

‘I can put you through to them,' she responded.

‘Do that.'

After a few rings a man's voice told him to hold the line. There followed late night background noises: a burst of laughter, a woman singing in the distance, and a loud crash as though someone had fallen over. Eventually the man returned to the phone, with the words ‘how can we help?' Justin realised at once that the answer was ‘not at all'. He explained that his assistant had disappeared from his office, leaving her coat behind, but of course that was no crime; he referred to the signs of a scuffle, but they were paltry and inconclusive; he mentioned that she was an Afghan refugee who had been threatened in the past by her family, but of course that was long ago and he had no evidence that the threat was still a live one. His narrative petered out with the assurance that he felt in his bones that something was wrong. To which he was told to bring those bones along for a closer inspection.

‘At least,' the policeman added, ‘you canna say this sounds like an emergency. Rather summat for the local force. Where did you say it happened?'